Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday April 08, 2011 @09:49AM
from the usefulness-versus-marketing dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Dual-core smartphones have only just hit the market, but mobile chipmakers Nvidia and Qualcomm are already turning their attention to quad-core chips. While it looks certain that tablets will be the first quad-core mobile devices in the market, chipmakers reckon they'll land in smartphones too. But do smartphones need quad-core chips? There's surely only so much multitasking a smartphone user can do. I'm interested to hear what smartphone apps/features/functions — if any — Slashdot readers reckon quad-core chips would enable"

Okay, so it doesn't apply to anybody on/., but for plenty of people, the idea of carrying their primary computing platform in their pocket is awesome. All they need is the ability for it to play nicely with a wireless keyboard/mouse and their big-ass TV, and they've suddenly got a home computer, with all their data stored up in the cloud.

No. You have 3 more cores shut down and not doing anything at all, unless your task is nicely multithreaded, in which case they are all working on the task to get it done faster so all the cores can go to sleep and save you battery life.

I will use it in ways that even I cannot now foresee. The reason general-purpose computers are so useful is because they can be used in ways that were not foreseen by the manufacturer. Please stop trying to determine how I will use my equipment. Just make it powerful and stop trying to lock me down to a particular usage scenario.

Assuming clock speed remains the same, 4 cores isn't even 4x as fast as a single core, even under the best of circumstances, due to overhead and and inefficiency derived by of breaking up one task into multiple threads. That isn't even counting the "turbo" feature that modern cpus have to increase clock speed when only a single core is in use.